Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl

Alan Anderson wrote:
In the context of "garbage collection", isn't the view rather well defined?

Yes, but the definition doesn't cross levels. For example:

I wonder what yours is. My view is that it's a resource which can be used and later returned to availability, but has somehow been misplaced before being returned.

Obviously, if it was *truly* misplaced, it couldn't be reclaimed. The GC subsystem needs to be able to find objects even when there is no longer any way to reach them from the application, for example. Memory "leaked" in a C program can still be reached from the kernel when you exit the process, etc.

To claim that discarding the result of [open] before a corresponding [close] doesn't create garbage because you can get to it with [file channels] misses the whole point. Sure, you can get to it with [file channels], but you can't know whether other parts of the application are still using that handle or not.

--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
It's not feature creep if you put it
at the end and adjust the release date.
.